legitimate directories - is a nospider meta tag needed?

does a links page to same topic sites hurt ratings and placement?

[annej]

I have what appears to me to be one of the most comprehensive sites on the net in quilt history. My goal is to not only give information and interest people in the topic but to also give quilt history enthusiasts a way to find other well researched info on the topic on the Internet. Because if this I have a links page/directory of dozens of links in several categories all related to quilt history. I never ask for return links. Could this links page/directory hurt me?

Anne

[engine]

Hi Ann,

There are a lot of threads in this forum about linking. Try this recent thread [webmasterworld.com]
Or this one here. [webmasterworld.com]

Hope it helps.

[richlowe]

My answer is "who cares?" You've put together a great resource which provides incredible value to your visitors. They will come back time and again, partially due to the quality of your links. I've been finding that the search engines are so picky and often silly that I am beginning not to use them anymore, and I certainly don't care about what they think of my site. And since I get 50,000 page views per day, the strategy seems to be working for me. Much of my traffic is from links to my site, referrals and ezines which mention my articles.

[annej]

Thanks for the link Engine.

Richlowe, I agree building a good content rich site with relevant links is what is important. I know a lot of my visitors come because people tell friends about my site. But Google is the search engine that sends by far the most search engine type referrals so I want to keep that going good. I want to be able to reach folks who might not know about my site except through a search engine.

Anne

[WebRookie]

I have some referring link pages from my hobby sites to other related sites for many years and in my experience have never had a problem.

Since you have so much actual content and your links are referrals to other quilt sites I would think you would be ok with Google.

[Marcia]

Anne, your pages are individually done and on topic, and you also have quite a number of high quality inbound links. It's all legitimate.

[annej]

Thanks for the help and encouragement everyone.

Marcia, >>your pages are individually done and on topic<< Does this mean links that are automatically generated in some way are more likely to be considered suspect by Google?

I read through the threads that Engine suggested. It looks like opinions are mixed as to whether a noindex tag should be used on link pages.

Anne

[europeforvisitors]

Many directory sites have moderate to high pagerank, and so do many sites that include directory content (including mine, which has thousands of outbound links on both article and directory pages).

If you're annotating each of your links with a sentence or two of text, and if you aren't placing more than a couple of dozen links on a page, you shouldn't have a problem.

[annej]

From what you are saying would it be better to have several directoryy/links pages, one for each sub category, rather than one long page?

[rogerd]

>>From what you are saying would it be better to have several directoryy/links pages ... rather than one long page?<<

Yes, annej. Both from a search engine and linked-site standpoint, this would be better. Better still - include an on-topic text introduction on each link page, and a text description of each linked site.

Face it, a giant list of linked site names doesn't do anyone much good. If you want to provide something of value to your visitors and to the sites that link to you, add some organization that makes it easy to find the kind of site you are looking for.

[annej]

Thanks for the help everyone. I'm working on a multi-paged directory with descriptions for each link. Next I need to come up with some good introductory paragraphs.

Anne